GDP and growth

We have seen in newspaper and popular speeches of the political leaders the push towards GDP growth and talks around it. It is one of the parameters that measure the country’s growth in terms of the overall economic activities within its boundary. This includes all kind of activity that adds value to the economy both material and non-material, i.e. services. If there is economic activity within the country, it will lead to more people engaged in livelihood (if assumed that it is equally distributed over the population). This although shed insufficient light on the actual growth of the quality of citizens, reason that it tells us nothing about the widening wage gap, it speaks nothing of the quality of economic activities e.g. even if there is construction of dam it counts in the GDP but it does not relate this with the disrupted social life due to acquisition of land, displaced people and their lost livelihood, uprooted forest etc. This is India’s forecast is ~7.3%.

India is a developing country with nearly 30% of its population living below the poverty line. Walk free Foundation says that India has the largest number of slaves in the world. In recent times, India also flags itself in the countries with the rising wage gap, i.e. the gap between poor and rich is widening. Government is also keen on the privatization of the economy with the last four years accounted for 65% of the net privatization post-liberalization. This month we also saw a nation-wide strike of workers who were worried that this will cause them job security. It saw the participation of 20 crore people.

India spends 0.9% of its GDP to research support, 1.5% of GDP to health care; both of which needs to go up if we have to self-sustain ourselves in the coming time. We spend a good fortune in maintaining and procuring defense equipment from other developed countries like US, Russia & Israel. We need to shift from post-action to pre-caution which can save and divert that fund in some productive activities and building human capital. It is good that our forest cover has seen a growth in recent years.